The echoes from the super bomb Midnight Hammer mission continue to reverberate, and the questions grow louder. Behind the hyperbole of Donald Trump and Secretary Pete Hegseth about “this super successful operation” creep nagging doubts.
Have the marathon flights of B-2 Spirit bombers with their payload – the Massive Ordance Penetrator GBU -57s – dealt the killer blow to Iran’s uranium enrichment programme, with its potential to deliver a nuclear weapon by the end of the year?
Why did Donald Trump pull the trigger now, having said he would give talk a bit more time? Furthermore, why has he switched to supporting regime change in Iran, having sneered at the botched enterprise by George W Bush to manage the same in Iraq twenty years ago?
We have had graphic satellite pictures of the devastation caused by the bunker-busters on the enrichment plants at the Fordow mountain and Natanz. There has been further demolition, this time caused by dozens of Tomahawk submarine-launched missiles on Isfahan. But we are yet to receive definitive Battle Damage Assessments – BDA in the jargon – about the extent of the destruction. Have MOP GBU-57s gouged the full depths of the enrichment halls perhaps a hundred meters beneath the rock of Mount Fordow?
A further mystery is the exact location of the fissile material, the partially enriched uranium, identified by the International Atomic Energy Authority in several reports. There is a powerful suggestion that some of this is near the weapons grade of 90 per cent purity. Is it possible it could take only a few months to fashion this into a couple of warheads for the new and more deadly range of Iranian ballistic missiles?
Compounding this worry is the clear satellite imagery from the middle of last week of a substantial convoy of armoured trucks loading up and then driving away from the facility at Fordow. There is a possibility that Midnight Hammer may be repeated to ensure destruction of the underground halls at Fordow and Natanz.
Inertia is not a strategy for the UK
The Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, has sworn revenge on American assets and bases throughout the region – and beyond. This is likely to include allies like the UK – always branded the “little Satan” to the “Great Satan” of the United States in the iconography of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Legalistic and diplomatic neutrality, as framed by the Starmer government make a poor alibi. Inertia is not a strategy; creatures caught in the middle of the freeway make easy road kill.
Supporters of the Starmer position, not least his fellow lawyers like foreign secretary David Lammy and attorney general Richard Hamer, believe lawfare outweighs warfare. Professor Philippe Sands, the eminent international lawyer and government consigliere, wrote in the Observer this weekend, “International law does matter … its requirements focus the mind on the important issues, namely the facts. Those facts concern what Iran is actually doing, and what its intentions are … The publicly available facts do not indicate that Iran is imminently going to use a nuclear weapon against Israel, as the US national security adviser has made clear.”
This is where military logic, practice, and reality collide with partially informed juridical opinion. First, the testimony to Congress was not given by the national security adviser, but the National Intelligence Director, Tulsi Gabbard, four months ago. The IAEA more recently gave rather a different interpretation – they were concerned about a sustain campaign of deception and concealment regarding the true intent of Tehran’s nuclear programmes.
Reports of granular intelligence analysis by the Israeli Air Force on the Israeli Ynet website gives the clearest clue why Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump decided to strike now. Agreed, Netanyahu has been obsessed with striking against Iran’s nuclear sites since 2011. A senior air force commander intentionally revealed to the Ynet commentator, though, the chilling intelligence that the Khamenei regime had ordered the production of 10,000 missiles to prepare in short order a “saturation attack” on Israel – bombardment by hundreds of missiles and drones at to overwhelm the most sophisticated air defences like Israel’s Iron Dome and the US THAAD batteries. The missiles would include hypersonic weapons, detectable in only the last few moments of flight. The fear is that prototype hypersonics have been trialed in last week’s attacks on Haifa and Tel Aviv.
The great reckoning for America and a roster of key European allies is likely to arrive with a thump at this week’s Nato summit
Add to this the possibility that just two or so could be fitted with nuclear warheads, and Israel is threatened with annihilation. The nuclear challenge is riddled with hypotheticals, possibilities and probabilities. Concealment and the egregious enrichment of uranium beyond the needs for civilian use, plus the dissembling on-off approach to talks and diplomacy, suggest malicious intent by Tehran – potentially with nukes. Leaving things as they are risks leaving things till too late.
For the rest, there is looming sensation of a worsening mess – from the casual neglect and violence against masses of civilians in Gaza and the West Bank, the threats against shipping in a widening area of the Red Sea and the Gulf. Now, there is talk of regime change in the bewildering political and social cauldron of Iran. Unlike 2003, when Ahmed Chalabi duped Tony Blair and George W Bush that he could bring a peaceful change of governance to Iraq, there is no realistic alternative government in waiting for Iran. Any attempt to find one invites further chaos.
So can Britain stand idly by, saying this is not our fight? I asked John Healey, defence secretary, last Thursday what the UK would do if Iran mined the Gulf and blocked the Straits of Hormuz – as the Iranian parliament has proposed? We have understandings and alliances with Qatar, Bahrain and the UAE, after all. He said he had never heard of any such suggestion.
The great reckoning for America and a roster of key European allies is likely to arrive with a thump at this week’s Nato summit in The Hague. The Iran crisis has brought, unexpectedly, the critical stress test to the American-European alliance.
The UK, no doubt, will preach jaw-jaw and legalistic de-escalation. For those allies now in facing real threat threats on several fronts, that will sound a bit like opting for the strategic road-kill posture. Stopping in the middle of the road, with your mind in neutral, is no option; you can be hit from both sides.
Robert Fox is defence editor
